Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1: Introduction: From Invisible Mothers to Virtual Mothering -- 1.1 The Ungraspable Community: Birth Mothers in South Korea -- 1.2 The Social Death of Birth Mothers: A Vital Mechanism of Transnational Adoption Practice -- 1.3 Virtual Mothering for a Frame of Recognition -- 1.4 Methods for Virtual Mothering -- 1.5 My Involvement in Virtual Mothering -- 1.6 Other Sites for Mothering: Sites for Other Mothering -- Notes -- Part I: Unbecoming Mothers: A History of Gendered Violence -- Chapter 2: Secure the Nation, Secure the Family

This book illuminates the hidden history of South Korean birth mothers involved in the 60-year-long practice of transnational adoption. The author presents a performance-based ethnography of maternity homes, a television search show, an internet forum, and an oral history collection to develop the concept of virtual mothering, a theoretical framework in which the birth mothers' experiences of separating from, and then reconnecting with, the child, as well as their painful, ambivalent narratives of adoption losses, are rendered, felt and registered. In this, the author refuses a universal notion of motherhood. Her critique of transnational adoption and its relentless effects on birth mothers' lives points to the everyday, normalized, gendered violence against working-class, poor, single mothers in South Korea's modern nation-state development and illuminates the biopolitical functions of transnational adoption in managing an "excess" population. Simultaneously, her creative analysis reveals a counter-public, and counter-history, proposing the collective grievances of birth mothers.

This article examines several key aspects of maternity homes for 'unwed mothers' in order to understand the overwhelming phenomenon of single mothers giving up their babies for adoption in South Korea and its naturalization as a common practice. Drawing upon Foucault's concept of biopolitics, this article recasts maternity homes as an institution of biopolitical welfare and highlights two features of social governance that the maternity home extends over the population of single mothers and their children. First, I argue that this unique, non-governmental social service agency functions as a hub of biopolitical technologies, where multiple social, legal, economic, and political forces work in concert to curb single motherhood through the promotion of adoption via (1) containment, (2) classification, and (3) circulation. Second, attending to the intricate dynamics of maternity home practices, this article observes the ways in which a single mother relinquishes her motherhood via adoption and, in so doing, becomes a birthmother, a self-regulating and self-governable subject.

This article considers the emergent figure of the Korean birthmother whose children have been placed into transnational adoption by focusing on the longest-running Korean television search-and-reunion show; such shows have played an important role and served as a critical cultural and technological institution through which Korean adoptees search for and reunite with their Korean birthmothers. Incorporating discourse analysis and autoethnographic writing, based on the author's experience as a translator for the show, this article unveils the processes through which the figure of the Korean birthmother emerges as a biogenetic, affective, and developmental maternal figure that is central to South Korea's nationalistic narrative of its long involvement in the transnational adoption. By treating this Korean birthmother that emerges through television technologies and narratives as a virtual mother, I offer an intervention into the naturalizing and nationalizing force of adoption discourse and thereby help to map out a politics of reconciliation for the losses in numerous lives of birthmothers and adoptees.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword: What Affects Are Good For -- Introduction -- The Parched Tongue -- Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema and New Media -- Slowness: Notes toward an Economy of Différancial Rates of Being -- Myocellular Transduction: When My Cells Trained My Body-Mind -- Women's Work and the Ambivalent Gift of Entropy -- Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora -- In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize -- More Than a Job: Meaning, Affect, and Training Health Care Workers -- Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space and Time in the Desert -- Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry -- The Wire -- Losses and Returns: The Soldier in Trauma -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index